A Newsweek cover story about Krugman appeared in the April 6, 2009 issue titled, "Obama’s Nobel Headache" with the tag lines, "Paul Krugman has emerged as Obama's toughest liberal critic. He's deeply skeptical of the bank bailout and pessimistic about the economy. Why the establishment worries he may be right."
Krugman was born into a Jewish family. He grew up on Long Island, and majored in economics at Yale University. He earned a Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He taught at Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, the London School of Economics, and Stanford University before joining the faculty of Princeton University, where he has been since 2000. He is married to Robin Wells, a fellow professor at Princeton, his second marriage.
Krugman says of his family, "I'm an only child. My parents, who have been married for more than 50 years, are retired -- my father worked for an insurance company, my mother was a Long Island housewife. My cousins include a CPA, a dental technician, a set designer, and a violinist. I am not, as far as I know, related either to the Krugman who works for the retail association, or to the coroner in the JonBenet Ramsey case. According to a newsletter my parents receive, about families that came from a now-vanished shtetl, I am distantly related to David Frum."

Krugman is politically liberal. He has been critical of Barak Obama. He favored Hillary Clinton in primaries.

We speculated back on 10/13/08 that the likelihood of his participation in an Obama administration is slim. Krugman says of himself, "I'm temperamentally unsuited for that kind of role. You have to be very good at people skills, biting your tongue when people say silly things." Newsweek's 4/6/2009 article echoes this assessment as does the New Yorker article.